Tuesday, November 12, 2013

A few
years ago I initiated a daily artistic test to answer the existential question,
“Who Am I?”–specifically, ** “Am I my
thoughts and feelings?” 500 years ago, the French philosopher and mathematician
Rene Descartes thought so. He famously declared, “Cogito ergo sum”…”I think
therefore I am”. He ignored the
squishier category of feelings. As I age, and look at my mortality, I’ve been using
art as a language of self-discovery. My process is often diaristic and
quotidian. I think this harkens back to my Catholic upbringing. Repetitive
prayers like the rosary, saying novenas (prayers for 9 days, 9 months or some
sequence of 9’s), or walking the 14 Stations of the Cross were predicated on
the idea that if one held a question or prayer in mind, an answer might be
forthcoming after sequential repetition. I am not religious anymore in this manner, but the
residual practice often emerges as an artistic framework.

Day #32 Groggy

“How Am I Feeling
Today?” is
a series of self-portraits of my feelings in a variety of media and paper stocks.
They are based on 89 days of morning photos I shot of my face in 2009 staring
into my bathroom mirror.Each day I
asked myself to name my feeling of the moment. (bored, calm, groggy, nervous
etc.)

I wrote the feeling in lipstick on my forehead and photographed my face in
the mirror. Last year I began to paint and draw each one. I’ve completed about
60 so far. There are 89 photos, the number of years my Mother lived, a-not-so-obvious
layer of meaning and self -identity for me.

"How Am I Feeling Today?" at The Dalton Gallery at Agnes Scott College

Fifty-five
of these portraits are now on view at The Dalton Gallery at Agnes Scott College
in Decatur, GA as part of the show, Material Witness. If you are in the
Atlanta area this Saturday, Nov.16, there will be a closing reception from 3-6pm.
Three artists and myself will be speaking briefly at 4:15 about our work. I
hope you can join us. Food and drink will be served. The address is 141 College Avenue, but the gallery is
actually on McDonough St just off College.

Day #56: Moody

I’m
posting the remaining portraits as I complete them on Facebook–usually one a week. “Moody” is the
current one.

**ANSWER: I quickly discovered that I’m
not my feelings, or my thoughts. They change rapidly throughout the day, and
from moment to moment. I think Descartes was using the idea of thinking as a
way to describe consciousness as the seat of self. I tend to agree with him…but
that’s a subject for another artistic endeavor.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Behold
my beautiful loaf of home-made white bread–warm, crusty, aromatic, and earthy.It’s been a two-month journey of
trial and error, several failures and adjustments to bread recipes to arrive at
this successful loaf.

I love
bread. Good bread. It’s comfort food from my childhood. Living in New Jersey as
a youngster in the 50’s, my Dad brought home crunchy deli Kaiser rolls, and
long loaves of Italian bread. Mom refused to buy the fluffy white brands of
sliced bread, allowing only Pepperidge Farm. When we moved to Rutland, Vermont
in 1962, Mom often bought bakery bread.

Here’s my
rocky journey to this golden loaf:

King Arthur Flour Education Center, Bakery, Cafe, and Store

September
15: I took a 3-hour sourdough class at King Arthur Flour Baking School in Norwich VT.

Sharon O’Leary
at King Arthur, demonstrates how to mix, handle, form, knead and bake
sourdough.

Grab, lift, flop and turn the autolyse (first mixing of the ingredients)

Folding ends of dough into the center after first rising

Hands on experience in rolling the dough into a ball

Placing the pre-folded dough in cloth lined bowls to rise again

Shaping the dough into batards (and round shapes)

The class's final baked round sourdough loaves

Each of
us in the class leaves with a loaf we baked, a small amount of starter culture
and the phase 1 batch of dough we mixed.

First mix of sourdough ingredients and the starter culture

Sept.
16th: I begin my car trip back to Georgia with the dough and culture
in a cooler in the car.

Sept.
23: I leave Brooklyn heading south again. It dawns on me in Delaware that I’ve
forgotten the culture, the preliminary dough, and the cooler in my daughter’s apartment
in Brooklyn.

Around
Oct. 1st I email King Arthur Flour’s help site and they send me
another starter culture via UPS free of charge. The living blob of wild yeast
and flour arrives healthy, and happily ready to grow.

New batch of sourdough starter culture

Three
tries at making my own sourdough bread ends in flat failures, sticky dough and a
final tough culture starter. I did something wrong!

sourdough bread #1-flat and misshapen

sourdough #2-barely rising

sourdough #3-sticky and tough

I
release from my mind the romantic notion of maintaining a live, friendlysourdough culture in my fridge that I will feed weekly
with flour. Goodbye idea!

Friend
and bread baker Julie Puttgen sent me a link to a delicious no-knead bread
recipe that she used to make a couple of round loaves when I visited her home in
Lebanon, NH this summer. It's cooked in a dutch oven in the oven:

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Meet
the latest iteration of my painting Golden Dawn. She’s no longer golden, but
does still represent a personal awakening…this upsurge in positivity and contentment that
I’ve noticed in my being. Death still lurks as a spoiler, but that’s not on the
“horizon”, so to speak.

ending with a
kaleidoscopic double swirl that I labeled as “finished”.

Golden Dawn, "Finished"

Not so.I noodled a few more times last month toning
down the central areas with red and de-emphasizing the black surface lines in an
unsuccessful attempt to eliminate the busyness.

Golden Dawn, Additional Adjustments

I was holding on to parts that I liked, but
that just did not work.

This
weekend I opened my stash of oils and made some serious changes. With a glass
of wine as moral support, and a deep sigh, I slashed away at the former acrylic
painting, leaving translucent areas, and reworking the double swirl, which is
the essence of my resurgence.I also pinned
up a page from the Portland Oregon Gallery Guide as inspiration showing the abstract
oil paintings of Barbara Sternberger whose courageous style I admire. I viewed them this summer at Elizabeth Leach Gallery.

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Welcome

Welcome to my blog. The Interwoven Heart is an artist's search for meaning in the face of death. I am turning the gaze beneath appearances in an attempt to discover the nature of self, being and non-being. My hope is for transformation. My current paintings, drawings, earthworks and performances are visual explorations of this journey. Join me in sharing ideas, images and insights along the way.

Cecelia Kane becoming an ancient maple

Counting the Eyes on the Cosmic Heart

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Cecelia Kane - Art and Performance Portfolios

About Me

I am a visual and performance artist on a spiritual path. I'm a mother and grandmother. My work is the manifestation of my search for self-definition and meaning in the face of death.
Lately I’ve been exploring the nature of being and existence in paintings and drawings that imagine Love as a multi-layered, interconnected cosmic essence inhabited by hearts, wings, eyes, plants and patterns. It is a search for God. Obsession, repetition and daily record keeping often occur in my art making process. I use my own body, clothing, fabric work, video, performance, voice, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the intersection of good and evil and the collision of loss and transformation.